Egyptians, who painted in fresco secco(dry fresco), the Minoans
coated the rough fabric of their rubble walls with a fine white lime
plaster and used a true (wet) fresco method in which the pigments
are mixed with water and become chemically bound to the plaster
after it dries (see “Fresco Painting,” Chapter 19, page 504). Conse-
quently, the Minoan painters had to execute their work rapidly while
the walls were still wet, in contrast to Egyptian practice.BULL-LEAPINGAnother fresco (FIG. 4-8) from the palace at
Knossos depicts the Minoan ceremony of bull-leaping, in which
young men grasped the horns of a bull and vaulted onto its back—a
perilous and extremely difficult acrobatic maneuver. Only fragments
of the full composition have been recovered (the dark patches are
original; the rest is a modern restoration). The Minoan artist painted
the young women (with fair skin) and the youth (with dark skin) ac-
cording to the widely accepted ancient convention for distinguishing
male and female. The painter brilliantly suggested the powerful charge
of the bull by elongating the animal’s shape and using sweeping lines
to form a funnel of energy, beginning at the very narrow hindquarters
of the bull and culminating in its large, sharp horns and galloping
forelegs. The human figures also have stylized shapes, with typically
Minoan pinched waists, and are highly animated. Although the profile
pose with the full-view eye was a familiar convention in Egypt and
Mesopotamia, the elegance of the Cretan figures, with their long, curly
hair and proud and self-confident bearing, distinguishes them from
all other early figure styles. In contrast to the angularity of the figures
in Egyptian wall paintings, the curving lines the Minoan artist em-
ployed suggest the elasticity of living and moving beings.THERA FRESCOES Much better preserved than the Knossos
frescoes are those Greek archaeologists discovered in excavations be-
gun in 1967 and still in progress at Akrotiri on the volcanic island of
Santorini (ancient Thera) in the Cyclades, some 60 miles north of
Crete. In the Late Cycladic period, Thera was artistically, and possi-
bly also politically, within the Minoan orbit. The mural paintings
from Akrotiri are invaluable additions to the fragmentary and fre-
quently misrestored frescoes from Crete. The excellent condition of
the Theran paintings is due to an enormous seismic explosion on
Santorini that buried Akrotiri in volcanic pumice and ash, making it
a kind of Pompeii of the prehistoric Aegean (see “The Theran Erup-
tion and the Chronology of Aegean Art,” page 87). The Akrotiri fres-
coes decorated the walls of houses, not the walls of a great palace
such as that at Knossos, and therefore the number of painted walls
from the site is especially impressive.
The almost perfectly preserved mural painting from Akrotiri
known as the Spring Fresco (FIG. 4-9) is one of the earliest examples
of a pure landscape painting (compare FIG. 1-18). The artist’s aim,
however, was not to render the rocky island terrain realistically but
rather to capture the landscape’s essence. The irrationally undulat-
ing and vividly colored rocks, the graceful lilies swaying in the cool
island breezes, and the darting swallows express the vigor of growth,
the delicacy of flowering, and the lightness of birdsong and flight. In
the lyrical language of curving line, the artist celebrated the rhythms
of spring. The Spring Fresco represents the polar opposite of the first
efforts at mural painting in the caves of Paleolithic Europe (see
Chapter 1), where animals (and occasionally humans) appeared as
isolated figures without any indication of setting.86 Chapter 4 THE PREHISTORIC AEGEAN4-8Bull-leaping,
from the palace at
Knossos (Crete),
Greece, ca. 1450–
1400 bce.Fresco,
2 8 high, including
border. Archaeological
Museum, Herakleion.The subjects of the
Knossos frescoes are
often ceremonial
scenes, like this one
of bull-leaping. The
women have fair skin
and the man has dark
skin, a common
convention in ancient
painting.1 ft.4-8ASarcopha-
gus, Hagia
Triada, ca.
1450–1400 BCE.
4-9AMiniature
Ships Fresco,
Akrotiri,
ca. 1650 BCE.4-9BCrocus
gatherers,
Akrotiri,
ca. 1650 BCE.